Easy CGI Review

Pros: Good database support, easy to contact technical support, near total control over domain/web site, fair prices and practices.

Cons: Not visually stunning, no amazingly unique features.

Bottomline: Easy CGI is a straight forward host that provides everything expected with a few nice pluses all for a fair price with pretty good service and reliability.

Easy CGI is by most standards, a fairly large host. Founded in 1994 as an ISP (the hosting section came four years later), they’ve prided themselves on providing word class support and services. At first glance, Easy CGI’s web site isn’t bad – it’s easy to navigate, easy to get information, and all of the things you’d expect from a web site. While EasyCGI.com not visually stunning, it does work.

From what I observed, everything seems pretty conventional with the Easy CGI. Pricing is about average for a budget host, The company’s Terms of Use is pretty standard, and there doesn’t appear to be any hidden or crazy things they get you to agree to or buy. Easy CGI seems straight forward, and seem to do a good job of communicating this. It’s nice to deal with a web host knowing they aren’t trying to rip you off.

The proof is in the pud. The Easy CGI control panel (which has no name, it’s just “Control Panel”) seems pretty generic in terms of features. It’s a little slow and clunky compared to cPanel, DirectAdmin, or the other major control panels, but it manages to get the job done without too many hassles. There’s definitely a learning curve if you’re used to the other major control panels (mainly because of layout, different wording, etc.) and with almost literally no graphics, the control panel is pretty ugly, but again, still functional. Within about 15 minutes, I was using it without any problems.

A nice thing is that Easy CGI supports lots of databases (MySQL, MsSQL, ODBC). They allow you to change the A, MX, and CNAME records from your control panel, and of course, do all of the standard email/FTP things. Webmail and stats somewhat lack, but again, are functional. FTP was pretty quick and worked without any problems. I managed to install some basic scripts (a forum system, a CMS, etc.) without any problems. There were some slight confusions with the host name (most of the time it’s localhost, but Easy CGI seems to use a different server for SQL, which is good). Once installed, everything ran fine.

There are no separate billing systems you have to deal with, which makes things easier and far less confusing. The billing functions are straight forward, easy-to-update, and simple enough. You can add/remove services, upgrade plans/features, view invoices, etc. all from your control panel, which means less hassles. There’s a built in ticket system, which seems simple enough, as well as some basic tutorials and a knowledge base.

From my experience, Easy CGI support was pretty good. I managed to figure out what I needed on my own. I didn’t really need them, but no review is complete without support contact. I called technical support and was speaking to a human about 20 seconds after dialing. Two simple questions–do you support mod_rewrite (Yes) and do you run Windows or Linux (Windows)–were answered quickly and politely. I sent the same questions via email (at noon EST) and got a helpful reply within 3 hours–pretty good for a Sunday.

Disclosure: Clickfire has an affiliate advertising connection with Easy CGI

Douglas Hanna is a former writer for Clickfire and other publications who went on to become CEO of a major web hosting company.

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77 Responded to this Easy CGI Review

Upset Customer says:

1/04/2008

Easy-CGI sucks. I have used them for over 3 – 4 years now and they have gone from good to terrible. The sites are down very often, the support spits out canned responses for 9 out 10 support requests. The people on the phone are incompetent and have no customer service skills at all. If you want headaches go with these guys but as for me I am leaving first chance I get.

Easy CGI really is probably the most incompetent of hosts. They actually tried to tell me that my classic asp application was not working because a virtual directory/application was not created on the folder. Anyone that has worked even remotely with asp knows that only .net applications require this functionality and that the asp dll is what handles the serving of classic asp pages not the .net framework. What the h***????? Makes me wonder who they hire. I could see if easy was mainly linux host that only offered windows as an alternative but they are windows only shop. UGH! Don’t do service with them you will regret it! Oh and they only have one connection to the internet to if that goes down so does access to your site. We have verified this in person at their facility.

Their 99.9% up-time guarrantee is a fraud. I have experienced about 8 hour downtime and my Wembot (web monitoring service) also showed less than 99.9% down time. But when I mentioned about it, they say that their record doesn’t show any down time. The fact is; when I made a phone call to them at the time of down-time, one of their representatives gave me an apology about it. So they must know it. What a dishonest company! Never trust them!

Easycgi customer service is terribly incompetent. Trying to resolve an issue with one of their servers through their ticket system is taking me 14 hours already!! To give you an indication of how terrible it is they use canned responses which have the greeting addressed to someone else’s name.

Stay away from these guys until they learn to actually listen to their customers.

STAY AWAY FROM EASYCGI!!! I activated a site a few days ago and visitors are continually unable to connect. We are down more than we are up!!! Mt email is FULL of complaints. IF I had known of the downtime issue I would have NEVER chose them.

I’ve used easyCGI for over 5 years. For the most part they were a good inexpensive webhost.

Lately – They have sucked. They announced a migration to new platform a few weeks back.

“Exciting changes are on the way for Easy CGI customers! I am pleased to announce that we will soon be transitioning to a new hosting platform, which will allow us to provide you with a more dynamic, feature-rich hosting experience.

This September, we will begin the process of migrating customer Web sites and e-mail to the new platform. In this new architecture, customer sites will not be tied to a single server. Rather, Web pages will be served by a pool of servers, increasing redundancy and reliability while improving performance.”

Wow – what a bunch of crap. The previous performance was much better! Why would I care which server my website is tied to as long as it’s accessible to the Internet and SE spiders. Too many 404 errors will kill your SE page ranks.

Since then, no traffic from Google. Traffic stats are horrendous. ASP mail forms quit working. 404 errors have gone through the roof. I have several clients that also host through them. More problems.

I think it’s time to move to a different company. EasyCGI, used to be pretty good but something really stupid happened most recently. Can I get a Refund?

This migration has been horrific. It’s taken so much time and energy trying to get their support staff to understand what, apparently, were common problems. And the answer is ‘sorry we can’t fix this problem we created’.

The site was in QA for a week. The result – they’ve potentially cost us thousands of dollars in lost sales with the terrible job migrating email accounts.

I have begun canceling all services with EasyCGI. I will no longer recommend them to clients. Am migrating websites as we speak. Seems a new company may have purchased them?

Sorry fellows, but has EasyCGI become IncompententCGI, ThreestoogesCGI, RipoffCGI, ….?

They are not just having technical difficulties.

My credit card was charged for unordered services. Run around run around. Guess someone needed a couple hundred extra from me. After speaking with the rep it now appears I will really have to get tough: opened a credit card dispute yesterday. What a bunch of crap.

Easy CGI totally sucks. We have a number of clients hosted with them and have recommended them over the past 5 years, but now they are just terrible. This whole switch to a new platform has been horrendous. I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out why my sites don’t work anymore. It usually takes anywhere from 4-5 or more support follow ups to get anything resolved. Some sites were not functional work weeks. They lost files of mine during the transfer, despite touting the fact that you can restore 2 weeks worth of backups. Their new transfer speed is slow as bawls. They have a general “not our fault” attitude when it comes to support. They have chat support and usually after 15 minutes of explaining your problem over and over, they say they have to escalate the issue and tell you to wait 2 days for a response.

I agree – their “upgrade” to a new data center last month resulted in my VPS server (and all its websites) being down for 8 days. Numerous calls to tech support, and always the same answer, “We apologize…we’re working on it…please be patient”.

I’ve had numerous web hosts over the last 10 years, and none have been as bad as easyCGI.com.

After faxing Email Proof of prior account cancellation, … EasyCGI sent me an email saying my cc charges were being reversed. If they would have believed me and been more supportive, I would not have opened a credit card dispute. The front line billing folks seemed helpful – once escalated – they wanted proof. Seemed almost accusatory.

Now a major business client’s website is being affected. The new EasyCGI system may work quite well for new clients, but this migration of old sites to new platform has been horrendous. The old system was easy. The new system is more complex.

Anyway, I may be moving my client’s website away as well over the next few days. Sort of feel sorry for the owners of this firm as the EasyCGI brand may have been severely damaged.

EasyCGI is the most unreliable host after CIHost. We host multiple domains, use them for our email handling and we have a VPS server. A couple of days before their un-orthodox and definitely unconventional move we applied for three more VPS Servers worth another US$ 4,000 per year. They totally mismanaged their move which resulted in a 13 days horror-movie for any webmaster/systemadmin. A week ago (beginning of November) our server was back online but without notice, apology or refund. Their support deleted all the history logged, and prior to their move (a couple of hours) EASYCGI posted new terms of use basically telling you that you have lost all rights to your data and that they have no obligation to keep our services running. Since today (14th November) our emai laccounts (50+) have stopped working. They have posted information of no use. All data is lost, inboxes are clear (more than 1 year of email history is lost). And again their support keeps ignoring any complaints. Very unprofessional. We have about 100,000 subscribers that we will inform about their incompetence. I am sure that they didn’t budget for the impact word-of-mouth has! EASGYCGI SUCKS BIG TIME!!!! We’re outta there next week!

My company has recommended EasyCGI for the last 4 years to 30 plus of our clients, with little or no issue. However, over the last few months the “New” EasyCGI (since the migration) is horrible. I cannot stress enough that you must avoid using this hosting provider at all cost. I don’t have enough time to describe the nightmare we have been going through the past 4 weeks..because I am too busy trying to fix all the issues and sooth the angry clients. We are moving all the sites to new hosts. When the dust settles, I’m planning a lawsuit against EasyCGI on behalf of my company and my clients.

it seems redundant after reading the rest of these posts but easycgi has definitely lost their ability to execute. We are moving sites rapidly now. I will also remove my credit card from their control panel based on some of the comments above. If anyone has posted complaints with BBB or other consumer protection agencies please post the website names here.

I signed up with Easy CGI early in 2007. They were a bit pricey but solid enough. The people in technical support had some skill and I could work with them when the rare problem arose.

This “migration” was really a sale to Endurance International Group. These guys understand very little about the asp.net platform and have broken my web app three times in the last month. Also, when they break things they don’t bother to say anything. I have been checking my website regularly to see if they have broken it again.

For example, I now have no way to install an instance of the asp.net 2.0 membership database on ms sql server and I am sure “technical support” wouldn’t have a clue what I am talking about, or care. Luckily I have an existing copy backed up that I can restore if necessary.

I have been fixing and working around these incompetents until I get up the energy to move my site.

You should know something about what you are selling. EIG has no honor; people like this disgust me.

For the past few years, I have hosted my site with EasyCGI. However, on Nov 18, 2008, my site was “migrated” to a new server as part of their “upgrade process”.

As with the other posters, this migration caused my site to collapse. First, the site wouldn’t send mail, then the pages could no longer connect to the database. I opened two “trouble tickets” about these issues and the only replies I received were “we’ll have someone get back to you within 24-48 hours”. Does this really mean that no one will even talk to me for TWO DAYS (48 hours)?? Meanwhile, as my site continues to be down while someone “gets back to me”, customers can’t purchase products from me, I can’t make any sales, and I can’t earn an income!

Yes, websites can go down sometimes, but I am completely dissatisfied with their total lack of support. No one replied to my trouble ticket for two days, even when I kept asking when the site would be fixed. No one bothered to even give me any advice on how to fix my site’s code to work on their new servers.

I am NO LONGER WITH EasyCGI. I have moved my site to another hosting company… if I hadn’t, who knows how long my site would have been down of if EasyCGI’s techs would have even replied to me.

If your website is basic HTML with no ASP, php, database connections, SSL, or any other type of “serving”, then EasyCGI may be right for you. Everyone else should be aware of the issues caused by the recent migration and the effect it may have on their websites.

New Developments: We have finally setup new servers and have found a relaible place to co-locate them (NOT EASY-CGI or Endurance Group whatever they call themselves now). I contacted support to annouce our move and to stop existing accounts (worth US$ 2,200/year). I got hold of a truely nice guy at billing. He cooperated and made note of my 2 page long complaints when asking why I was leaving (this time I was well prepared). I managed our domains (unlocked them and got the authorization code for the move) and without much friction billing excepted my resignation. Now here is where it gets tricky: he opened a support ticket (on all account) which stated that the account was scheduled for closure. This was about a week ago. Status: ticket open – no response. I have been updating all those support-tickets daily – shouting at them to close the account – mentioning that I will refuse to pay for additional days that they keep my account open, but all to no avail. I have contacted billing by phone and they are under the assumption that I am not longer a customer. All the sites are still live and somehow they don’t understand how to remove our containers and personal accounts. This company has fallen from a nice ranked provider to the NUMBER 1 of incompetent and ignornant organization in Hi-Tech History!

I’ve been with EasyCgi for 3 years and it worked perfectly until this October. It is now the worst hosting company on Earth, my site is down 80% of the time and their tech support is terrible. I am moving to another company just today…

I have been with EasyCGI for seven years. I have been very satisfied. I had a good hosting package, lots of features and functions, good support. And really, never had a problem with them. Then they sold out to another company and it has tanked them. I have hosted my own sites, and consistently recommended them to my clients over the years. Now, I look like a jackass. I am pulling my sites and all my clients as quickly as possible. The sellout and migration have ruined this once good company. The last two months have been a complete nightmare. STAY AWAY from EASYCGI at all costs if you are smart.

Stay away from easycgi. They’re failing miserably with this migration. It’s endless trouble. No support. SQL databases not available. Sites not available. IP’s changing so DNS records can’t find your site. When email switched to new server – every message I ever received in my outlook client started downloading again. Thousands of them. I’m trying to get a simple answer from tech support right now as to what the address of my sql server is so I can change ny connect strings. Waiting 4 hours for that and sql databases are not accessible. This is the WORST customer support ever.

EasyCGI is terrible it ttok almost 4 days to redo server extensions and deliver a backup. technical support has no clue and it your site drops they will not assist in fixing it. They are clueless, amateurish, and definitely not worth the hassle. Go somewhere else…

I was a loyal customer for 5 years and this forced migration in Nov, 2008 killed my site down and I’ve been told after weeks of tech support promises that I now need to find a new hosting company. There was no sense of urgency to restore my site. I’ve lost weeks worth of revenue, all of my advertisers have canceled and they unraveled 5 years worth of hard search engine optimization efforts. I may end up out of business. I

Do yourself a favor and avoid EasyCGI! They are completely incompetent.

The migration they did was terrible! They shut down my website on old platform and locked the FTP server. I couldnt even save my data!
I asked them to resume the website. The customer service refused it and deleted my support cases. What an honest company! It is now mid-night and I have been dealing with all the trouble..

Agree with the others. Went from good to WORST! During the horrible and still not completed transition EasyCGI destroyed our site – a non-profit charity FirstScholarshipFund.

They lost all email addresses and past emails. They lost the database. The lost our SSL. They changed the script support and we couldn’t receive customer feedback or error messages. The email was down for days, the DB for weeks and the SSL for months. We could not process any transactions and lost significant donations.

Easycgi lost all files in my FTP.
And all my application with sql server I need change because dont have anymore external connection.
I move to another Hosting.
All Technical support dont stay able to resolve problems.
Dont buy this hosting.

Must agree with user comments above. Solid company until October 2008 “Migration”. After that our site lost the ability to execute simple FORMMAIL! They stopped supporting Python programming language. Basically our customers could not reach us via our website for 2 months before we realized it wasn’t just the bad economy affecting our sales — it was a bad hosting company! They recommended re-programming our site with a new scripting language, i got a new web host instead. While at one time I may have recommended them, AVOID EasyCGI AT ALL COSTS!

No need to beat a dead horse, but easycgi f’d me and my clients over big time. They lost significant data from two of my clients’ databases. Their ticket system is pitiful; their first line phone support just as bad. And if you want to escalate, talk to a manager, etc, it is *impossible*. Literally. DO NOT FALL INTO THE EASYCGI TRAP. You have been warned.

Stay away from this nightmarish company. They should not be in business. They used to be real good but since their migration, they have been monsterous. In a nutshell, they screwed up my business and have set me back a couple of years — I lost clients as a result and my company brand is nearly in tatters. It doesn’t take more than a few days of down time to destroy your ecommerce operation, and easycgi delivered more than a few days of downtime….

As I pick up the pieces and rebuild, I am making it a personal mission of mine, as a way to heal the pain they have caused me, to do all that I can to ensure that as few people as possible suffer from the incompetence and immorality of this awful company. If you are interested in a class action lawsuit, email me at: max_fromm@yahoo.com

Absolutely appalling customer service! At the end of last year they moved an important internal web-based system of ours to a different server. It didn’t run properly on the new server, due without any doubt to a different server configuration. In spite of repeated support requests the problems are still not resolved and they basically tell us “It’s your responsibility – you need to fix it”. Steer well clear!

I agree with the general comments above about EasyCGI. They were a good if somewhat overpriced service when I signed on. After being acquired by Endurance International Group they became a bad company. The original company is completely gone.

I had a couple of simple problems early on after the “migration”: 1. database moved with no notification, and the backup they used to restore it was old. 2. had to reconfigure for a server cluster – no notification 3. had to reconfigure for email server change, and on, never a notification.

This was OK as I keep full backups and am familiar with my development platform.

Then, a few weeks ago, I started noticing large intermittent periods of slow http server response (hours at a time). By this I mean in the neighborhood of 30 kilobits per second download speed. I tested this from various locations around the world using http proxies and simple file downloads to make sure it wasn’t me–it wasn’t

“Technical” support denied the problem, so I changed my hosting company after a day or two of that.

Hosting companies are low margin operations and most of them could go out of business or get acquired by stupid companies at any time, so:

1. keep your domains with an ICANN registrar.
2. keep full backups
3. be prepared to change hosts at a moment’s notice

I have been hosting my commercial website with webstrikesolution.com. Recenty they got aqquired by cgi and they totally screwed my site. The site is down 90% of the time and Customer Service reps are bungs of idiots.

I was a VERY HAPPY customer of Webstrike Solutions, till easycgi bought them, oh what a terrible mess its been since. I am almost complete with my transition to hostgator, who have been great.

Easycgi are a categorically beyond inept nightmare – my site has been down more times in the last month than I care to remember, and my primary email address has been bouncing without me knowing, potentially losing me business. They fix it for a while, then it breaks again.

Webstrike would attend to a problem within the hour, these guys take 24 to 48 hours, and then still don’t fix it. They are intolerably bad and should not be in business.

First, the techs are completely incompetent. They don’t know what a HTTP Request/Response is. I had nothing but trouble.

– Half of the control panel settings were unusable
– Every request to a URL without a trailing slash were 302 redirected to the URL appended with a slash
– I had to send proofs and screenshots with network-tools.com and they were still saying that was client side (my error)
– When I was accessing my “/stats” folder, sometimes the whole site was freezing.. I had to enter “/stats/”.. in fact every URL was showing this behavior.. The site just didn’t worked
– I asked for IIS7 static files compression (At first it was enabled).. they disabled it without my consent… and they didn’t knew what “static files HTTP compression” was. They sent me a link “Dynamic Files Compression Is Disabled By Default”.. 2 days wasted just because they are not able to read
– While testing, they put several files on my home folder without cleaning it
– They didn’t gave me a full refund for the “no service” I had
– Every response to issues were basically.. “It’s client error”
– In fact, the only thing that is working with this company is the billing department.
– Did I mention the control panel features are half broken ?

Serioulsy, we were about to lunch our business site with this host but it would have been a disaster. The hours spent with the technical support made me loose a lot of time (money).

I don’t know why this host is in the top 10 of this site.. I just don’t know..

Was with webstrike and everything was fine. Then these EasyCGI took over and everything tuned in to a DISASTER.
First they changed the IP address and since I use separate name servers the website broke immediately. When I found this out it took almost a day for the mickey at tech support to figure this out.
So then I point to the new IP address and strangely no PHP script executes. But they blame it on my name servers.
So now I change the nameservers (breaking some other services that I have paid for) and the website somehow magically starts working (Same IP address and all). I was still going to continue with this service and then I realize that the technical mickeys at EasyCGI have managed to deleted all MySQL database updates for the last 3 months.
Of course when I contacted tech support they are just mickeys on the phone who are supposed to be ‘technical support’, but don’t know anything technical. They have no f******* idea as to where 3 months of updates have gone.

This whole service is a JOKE. I can run a much better service than this out of my home desktop. The only reason I PAY for this is for peace of mind and that is something I have not been getting from EasyCGI.

EASYCGI is without doubt, the most useless and professionally incompetent web host ever. Everything – and I mean every little bit – that you read on here is true.

I currently have 3 client’s sites down….DOWN!!!….4 years with webstrike solutions and I can count on 2 fingers the number of technical issues that we experienced. Btw, thanks for selling us out webstrike and ruining literally hundreds of businesses – much appreciated.

This is what has so far happened since EasyCGI took over 3 months ago :

– they left me cold with one client as they proclaimed they weren’t able to host the site…ummm, it’s ASP, SQL Sevrer 2005….the same as my other dozen or so client websites!!….just pathetic….

– played email ping -pong with them for over 4 weeks now…yes 4 weeks….they classic reponse is – sorry if we have caused you any inconvenience…you cant get a decent answer out of them….its actually scary how technically illiterate they are.

and like I said , I currently have 3 client sites that are down…..

devotedconsltancy.com.au, imagecowyboy.com and bleublancrouge.com.au

Now what do to you think these clients are thinking? They are furious.

As a former Webstrike reseller I can sympathise with all of the ex-Webstrike customers who have posted comments here. We have over 30 sites that were transitioned (mostly unsuccessfully) and I am currently in the process of having client’s register a hosting account with another provider of their choice so we can move their site.

This experience with EasyCGI has finished me as a reseller – as the hosting dramas are giving our design company a bad name. I will now require our clients to register for a hosting plan themselves so we can avoid having to deal directly with any hosting dramas in the future.

To the Endurance International Group who are behind all of these hosting aquisitions – I hope your company busts its *ss real soon and you’re all waiting in social service lines.

I am also a former Webstrike reseller and this migration has been the worst experience in the 10 years I have been hosting sites.

I have never dealt with a company that is soo clueless and incompetent! No one in support knows what they are doing! I will state what the problem is in a chat or email and they will continually ask me what the problem is. I tell the over and over and I am pretty sure they know how to read the chat and figure it out!

After migration, one of my biggest e-commerce site goes down. Support claims that they didn’t know there was a SQL server associated with the account and that they could not find it or even turn the old servers back on. What kind of crap is that!!!?? How can you NOT know??

From a business standpoint, it makes no sense to turn off servers or wipe them after sites have been migrated. They should have had backups of backups and even kept the old servers online – just in case there was a problem. I have lost all of my backups and my database. I had to refund thousands of dollars for lost business, lost data and no websites!

They don’t even have the common decency to provide a year free for their mistakes and instead suspend what sites I do have left for nonpayment. For the sites that did migrate successfully, I continually get calls for downtime, no email and script errors in the control panel. Wow…I never thought hosting could get this bad.

I could write pages about how Easycgi has gone from good to the most horrible hosting place on Earth. As of now my website has been down for 24 hours and there has been no activity on the ticket I opened. This has happened twice just in the last two weeks. Our site is frequently down, the 99.99% uptime is a huge fraud – and that is an understatement.

Today, I am done with them. I feel bad that I ever suggested them for anyone because they are in the same shoes as me. Last year when they switched their servers it was done extremely unprofessionally. They broke our website to the point that it I had to rebuild it from scratch. They overwrote out event calendar (that contains at least 10 events per day) with a backup that was 3 months old. They broke our forum then overwrote it with an old version as well. When I asked them for the latest backup they kept saying that is the latest. They pretend to be stupid or they are stupid I don’t know but one runs in circles with their customer service.

They will break your site, randomly reset you8r passwords and they do not explain anything, they do not take responsibility for anything. Their customer support sucks big time, they are like drones. I have been asked for my last name at least 10 times, claiming is not on file. The list just goes on and on. My mission right now is to move my site off of this hell hole, and help everyone else I referred to do the same. At the same time, since there is no way to give feedback to the company they can count on me giving my wonderful feedbacks on places like this one.
Don’t even waste your precious time, and money.

Count me as another customer that has just switched away from EasyCGI. I have had them for years but their service has gone down the hole within the past year. I constantly have problems with my website going down and when I contact customer service I always get a response stating that there is nothing wrong. Every now and then they will acknowledge that there is an issue but the majority of the time it’s not their fault.

My website has been down for 3 days in a row now with no activity on my support requests. It’s unbelievable how bad their service has gotten. I don’t run a high volume website but I do require it to be up 100%. I will never use EasyCGI again.

I started having trouble with this company when it was acquired by EIG in the second half of 2008, so I moved my e-commerce site to another host.

There are enough descriptions of amazing incompetence by this company here to give you the idea (and that was my experience as well), so there is no need to repeat my story which began and ended in about a week. It was actually kind of funny how clueless they were.

However, in reading comments here and elsewhere about Easy CGI I learned that many people don’t keep regular, complete backups but trust the host to take care of that.

Hosting companies are low margin, usually pretty shaky businesses. Even if yours is good today it can easily go downhill or out of business very quickly.

Trusting a host to keep your backups or giving more than 6 months rent at a time doesn’t seem like a good bet to me.

I wish I read these reviews before I signed on with easycgi, nothing but problems from day 1. My site has been down 3 times this week alone. All I get from tech support is “sorry for the inconvenience”. We’ll that’s not very satisfying when I’m losing money because my site doesn’t work. I’m currently shopping for a new hosting provider. I would NOT recommend hosting your site with this company.

They are down again…all of my sites they are hosting including email! All day they’ve been down. Here’s the message on their “reseller” login page.

Alert
We are currently experiencing accessibility issues with one of our data centers and apologize for the inconvenience. In the interim, we are disabling access to control panel tools, to minimize the effects to your site.

EasyCGI is worst site i have come across. They terminated my account saying you have used your account for file hosting. In real i have stored an 30MB Ms Access file with few asp pages that come to total 60MB at most. The plan says I have 350GB storage space with 3500GB Bandwidth @ 10$/month. They terminated my account with complete data loss and no refund. It has worst management with 3 to 4 days reply time.
WORST FILE HOSTING
WORST FILE HOSTING
WORST FILE HOSTING

I was a happy customer of an excellent hosting company called WebStrikeSolution.
Unfortunately, EasyCGI bought Webstrike’s business along with all the customers’ database on March 2009, along with my hosting account which was migrated to EasyCGI.
The migration process itself was terrible and unprofessional with many unacceptable problems:
1. EasyCGI copied the site to the wrong location on their server (IIS was not pointing to the root folder).
2. They restored a copy of the site that was 3 weeks old and put it online – until I figured out the problem, users have already created new data in the database, so I had to waste many hours trying to sync between the two access database records (I had a duplicate key issues because of that). Of course EasyCGI did not have an up to date backup (luckily I had).

Since then my site experienced many hours of downtime and it took them way too long to respond to each downtime incident and to bring the site back online… so gracefully, they agreed to give me access to their premium support, for 2 month for free. But guess what, when the two months expired and they began charging for the premium support I’ve asked them to cancel the premium support – what do you think that they did? You guess it- they have canceled my hosting account and took the site offline.

And last but not least, this month there was a billing issue (something to do with credit I had in the account that was not reflected in the invoice), 1 day after I’ve received the corrected invoice (and even before i had the chance to pay – again due to a problem in their billing system that showed the wrong amount) they have pulled the plug and took the site offline.

To summarize the above – if you value your money or your website, skip this company.
There are much better deals in the market (from both price & service perspectives)

The service is a disaster because there were problems after a few days to be with EasyCGI wanted a payment of the payment made and repaired it saying to continue.

Now after 3 months I’ve been working 12 days without the pages of my domains the problem started the day and today still do not work I have opened 3 tickets and 10 chats and no solution is completely incompetent and over $ 45 more I ask for support.
I had to change DNS and make my pages to another hosting.
The technical sarvicio is a mess and the answer is always the same one shown:
Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. One of our higher level technical specialist is working hard to resolve your issue with the website. I have once again updated the ticket #???????? and requested to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

The service is a disaster because there were problems after a few days to be with EasyCGI wanted a payment of the payment made and repaired it saying to continue.
Now after 3 months I’ve been working 12 days without the pages of my domains the problem started the day 2010/02/04 and today 2010/11/04 still do not work I have opened 3 tickets and 10 chats and no solution is completely incompetent and over $ 45 more I ask for support.
I had to change DNS and make my pages to another hosting.
The technical sarvicio is a mess and the answer is always the same one shown I have 10 tickets equal responses:
Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. One of our higher level technical specialist is working hard to resolve your issue with the website. I have once again updated the ticket #?????? and requested to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

After EIG took over the reliability and service that EasyCGI had supplied disappeared. more important … we started getting daily bots downloading our site content. Did a trace on the bots and they all originated in Moscow! Yes THAT Moscow. Then we traced the EIG organization and near as I can tell they are fronted by some group in the Netherlands but are really Russians.

I am an IT Consultant that deals with several web hosting companies. EasyCGI is by far the worst and most unprofessional organization that I have dealt with. Their transition from Webstrike was a complete disaster as was their platform migration.

Recently, in working with a client that uses EasyCGI they did the following:

1. Charged a renewal for an SSL cert that they did not actually renew. It took them 3 weeks to fix this situation causing the site to be effectively unusable during that time. In the process, they double charged for the renewal and have yet to provide the correct credit.

2. Once they finally fixed the SSL cert whatever they did caused the FrontPage extensions to break, making the site uneditable from my client’s point of view. This took at least 3 business days to correct.

3. In fixing the FrontPage issue, they deleted all of the files on the site and notified us that they had no backup. Fortunately we did.

4. After spending a few hours uploading the backup, we learned the SSL cert was again not properly installed.

This has not been an isolated incident. If you do nothing with your site, things seem to work well. As soon as you attempt to make the slightest change, things go awry. 80% of the fixes they apply seem to break something else.

Attempts to contact their support department usually result in several delay tactics (confirming and reconfirming your identity with security questions and promises to return calls that never happen, etc.)

They may not be the worst host available, but their up their. Needless to say, the ranking their given on this site is completely bogus.

Not recommended. I admit that hosting package is truly full of features. But most of my websites fail too frequently (increasingly bad in the past 6 months) and sometimes remain inaccessible for 2-3 days before somebody solves my problem. Imagine any business relying on such a service.

Go away from EasyCGI, Find yourself a respectable hosting service where TS appreciate what “website down” means to web admins and business owners.

Beware this is a terrible company. I am having a hard time canceling the account.
The system won’t let me and continues to show that I will be charged renewal fees.
I contacted customer service and all I see right now is the old pending charges + a charge for Domain Privacy – something I didn’t order.

EasyCGI, I could not reach my website, numerous times, I even sent a traceroute to their IT support and they escalated the issue to their tier 2 support, and to no avail, they said the problem must be on my side. Even though it would timeout once it passed their demarc point which is inside their buiding. It would be up for 2 hours then down 4 hours, then it would be back up, I did not change any code. I was using their Microsoft servers not their Unix servers. Numerous times, I could not get into the control panel. Also, had problems when I added a second domain to the account, they started billing me multiple problems, but they did give me a credit each time it happened. In 2010, it got worse, I have switched to Lunar Pages, and my website had been up and running with no problem and their tier 1 support is excellent.

EasyCGI are the worst web host I have ever encountered! I used to be a Webstrike customer until they were brought out by EasyCGI. Webstrike were great but problems started from the first day of the EasyCGI takeover. Since then things have gone from bad to worse. My site goes offline at least once a month and often runs incredibly slow. Their tech support people are completely incompetent and often create new problems while trying to fix existing problems. Visitor stats for my website stop working very frequently. This has just happened again and after raising a new ticket I received a reply that said “I was unable to view any visit logs on our server to the website” – and that ticket was marked as Resolved! Unbeleivable! This is a website that has over 1000 visits per day and they say the reason the stats have stopped is because the website is not getting any visitors!
That was the last straw and I’m currently looking for a new host. I should have changed long ago.

Sounds like I just had a similar bad experience with EasyCGI as everyone else. I hadn’t used the hosting service in over a year and received an email about an automatic renewal draft. It took me a while to find my login information. By the time I found the login information (21 days later, not even a 30 day notice), I get charged a $35.00 early termination fee for canceling on the day that the renewal is being drafted. I’m really aggravated by this. $35 for a half day of hosting service, really?? Couldn’t they have waived half a day? The billing rep wouldn’t do anything to help. I think I’m going to try to dispute the charge on my credit card.

To summarize it don’t do this to yourself. If you want a peace of mind this is not the company you want to deal with. Servers poor performances and the lack of good and reliable customer service are both the main reasons to avoid it.

This used to be a good service until they were purchased by another company in 2008. Now easycgi.com SUCKS !! Do yourself a favor and avoid this company at all cost. Their uptimes are atrocious and to make it worse when your site goes down they have incompetent customer service that takes days to fix anything. Save yourself the stress and avoid them.